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Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2012 4:30 pm
by oliroe
Now trying to get Blackgold to test the card, given that other people are having similar issues with one of the tuners I think the card may not be the issue. If they say there's nothing wrong with the card I'm going to push for a refund.

I've ordered a TBS 6280 card which should be coming tomorrow. If there are issues with that I'm probably going to give up on Media Center (until Windows 8 Beta). I've thrown alot of cash at the problems and I'm tired of all the issues. I'll let you know how I get on with the TBS card

Oli

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 1:11 am
by oliroe
I've been playing around with my HTPC the last couple of days and it looks like the Blackgold card works perfectly with MediaPortal. I assumed the problem was hardware rather than software because a cold shutdown solves the problem of a missing tuner temporarily.

I installed the TBS 6280 and is as it should be as far as I can tell. Both tuners work after soming out of S3 sleep and on reboot. If no problems arise in the next week or so I think it'll be ok. Think I'll put the Blackgold 3620 tuner on ebay if they won't give me a refund. Will probably sell me Hauppauge T-500 as well because that's always had intermittent problems coming out of sleep.

Hopefully this is the end of my troubles but I wouldn't bank on it

Oli

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2012 4:26 pm
by oliroe
Thought I'd finish my tail off. The TBS card works absolutely perfectly and I couldn't be happier.

In summary, if you're having problems with a BGT 3620, either get the TBS card or use Mediaportal rather than Media Center

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 3:46 pm
by philljoynes
oliroe wrote:Looks like I was wrong, still losing a tuner after sleep/rebooting. Absolutely gutted.

Must be a faulty card
Strangely enough that mirrors my own feelings!!!

After rebuilding the machine over the weekend of the 21st, I was convinced it will work after it had for 2 days on the machine I borrowed.

I am still getting the single tuner issue along with a large amount of others :(

Anyway this has just pushed the MRS and to be fair Me (I am getting old). Media Center is a great concept, but has never 100% worked since I started in 2005 (mainly due to tuner issues or issues that appeared when upgrading OS).

We are now getting Virgin Media version Tivo on Friday! Hopefully a system like this will be more reliable and have a limited set of components to go wrong (hopefully). On top of this we will need a blu-ray player, so I think I will get one that can do DLNA and fingers crossed we will have all the functionality I tried to
get previously!

Thanks for all the fish, ah sorry I mean help ;)

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2012 12:49 pm
by RustyMCE
I'm having endless problems with mine. Once I'd sussed out how to set up with dual sources I.e. Virgin stb + Freeview, I thought I was there, however, I found out I wasn't once, having set up three tuners; 2 x dvb-t and one dvb-c that if I record on the dvb-c from the stb, then try to do the same on dvb-t, it tells me all tuners are in use.

So, I set up again & now this time, no matter what I tell mce, it absolutely will not use the IR blaster red eye to change the stb channel. It was prior to the reset though. PLus I have follwed BG's advice on disabling ehome transceivers in dev mgr.

On top of this, I regularly lose tuners on restart. All in all, pretty poor since the thing was the fat end of £130. Disappointed is an understatement.

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 4:07 pm
by oliroe
Just thought I'd update again

Have now regained my sanity after a couple of weeks of faultless TV viewing with the TBS 6280 card. I'm now able to reboot, S3 sleep and quickly change channels without any fear of something going wrong. If any of you still have problems with the Blackgold I strongly recommend you go for this card instead.

I now have everything working correctly including subtitles in MKV's through My Movies. The only problem is I'm a bit bored, might look into TunerfreeMCE

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2012 6:42 pm
by weeble
Looking at possibly getting one of these to put in my media centre. I heard issues with their previous card losing tuners and hd being a cpu hog. Now i dont intend to play the media on my media centre (dont want a pc in living room so use my 360 and microserver has no audio) basically i want it as a recorder and nas box. The pc itself is a hp microserver running win7 x64 with 3gb ram and lots of hdds (dual core AMD Neo N36L 1.3ghz)

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 9:55 pm
by RustyMCE
Given up on the BG 3620, I may as well have stood at the window throwing ten pound notes out for all the good it's been. This time, I've done my reading, checked it all out & gone with a PCTV Nanostick -T2 usb stick. One tuner, it'll do the trick for the freeview HD schtick.

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2013 12:54 pm
by kramaring
I had read this post before buying a BlackGold BGT3620 but saw that the comments were several months old. The latest driver (8.1.0.0) includes the comment "Win 7 Tuner loss workaround & VHF HD for Sweden."

I bought the tuner anyway and with the latest driver installed it has worked faultlessly for me, I have suffered no tuner loss problem.

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2014 8:18 pm
by phunksta
Another fed up owner here. Kinda got through the lost tuner issue with the last driver update. Since upgrading to Win 8, and a Haswell CPU GPU, the reception quality has become terrible.

The live TV or recorded material both regularly breaks up into grey boxes for a few seconds, until it seems a decent I frame resets the picture again. It makes media almost unwatchable.

The gltches are embedded in the recordings it seems as I can rewind and get the exact same glitch on replay.

I tried hooking up a sat dish to see if the dvb-s tuners had any better reception. Simple answer is no.

And yes their support simply don't bother answering.

To add insult I bought the card as it also has analog, which famously doesn't work on many of these cards.

I didn't have this problem with the card running win7 on a much older AMD system so as a last ditch I am going to try going back to the ATI card I had in that setup in case the Intel GPU is freaking things out.

But patience is thin. I will most probably replace it.

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2014 12:36 pm
by DrBen
Just had "Tuner not available" on a new build PC: H81M-PLUS MB with latest BIOS update, Intel Core i3-4130T (using same for graphics - no card), 4MB DDR3 running in XMP profile, SATA III SSD, Blu-ray writer driver. 330W PSU. Nothing else in system. Installed Windows 7 (32 bit) Home Premium (without network connection). Installed the MB drivers using DVD that came with it - used the install all option. No problems. Ran winodws updates until they had all completed. Installed the BGT3620 card in PCIe slot 2. Installed drivers for same 8.1.1.2 (did not do the registry import as this point as I had forgotten about that). Opened WMC for first time and ran setup. Found all channels without problems. Watched some inc HD broadcasts. PC to sleep... PC Resumed.... Tuner not available message! I'm now going to try: swap PCI slot and if that fails turn off XMP. Then maybe a few options/changes in BIOS. MS Security Essentials software. Any other ideas?

Each time I'm going to follow procedure: Device Manager to remove driver including checkbox to remove all files, uninstall WMC and media player completely (using turn windows features off). shutdown. remove BGT3620 card. Boot up and delete all files containing "11317231*" in C:\Windows\. Import registry tweak (it will just overwrite if there already). remove all files at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome. Restart then shutdown. Install card. Boot and install drivers 8.1.1.2. Install WMC and Media Player. Reboot then open WMC and run first time install to scan for channels etc. watch a few inc HD ones for several seconds. Stop live TV. Wait 5 mins. In case the tuners end up being used for a single over-the-air scan (I noticed that reg entries supposedly stops this but just in case this is missed first time round I will wait). Restart. Watch live-tv. Sleep. Resume.... did it work? Repeat for another change.

Very time consuming but determined to get to bottom of this as I have a H81M-C with same processor and almost identical setups which has been running fine for several months (it uses Norton). Will definitely post update whatever happens. Ben.

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:20 pm
by DrBen
Had "Tuner not available" on first attempt (without Security Essentials installed) after approx 6 sleep and resumes. This was in a fresh PCIe slot also. Am going to try this (not sure if it is included in Windows Updates already) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981129.

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 11:33 am
by CyberSimian
DrBen wrote:Had "Tuner not available" on first attempt (without Security Essentials installed) after approx 6 sleep and resumes. This was in a fresh PCIe slot also.
I have a Dell XPS420 HTPC which has a problem with my TBS6284 quad tuner card (it is absent from "Device Manager" on wake from sleep). I believe that this is caused by defective motherboard BIOS (Dell did not implement PCI-Express version 1.0a correctly). So I cannot use sleep with this system.

But I can use hibernation with this system. I think that hibernation re-initialises the tuners on wake, and this avoids the sleep problem. However, hibernation has usability difficulties (as distinct from the functional difficulties that you are currently experiencing). In particular:

(1) You should disable the POWER button on your remote control (if instead you change it to hibernation, it will terminate immediately any recording that is in progress when you press the POWER button).

(2) You need to wake the HTPC by pressing the power button on the system unit; you cannot use the remote control to wake the HTPC.

There are solutions to both (1) and (2), but you should first try hibernation for a few days to see if it will actually solve your problem (your problem may be different from mine, and not susceptible to the same solution).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 8:26 am
by DrBen
Having done more tests I still have continuous resume from sleep issues with the BGT3620 on my ASUS H81M-PLUS motherboard. This problem does not occur on my H81M-C MB system. Both have latest BIOS update (both showing same BIOS rev / date). Both use same CPU i3-4130T. Both use SSD in SATA3 mode. Bare Win 7 Home Premium 32bit Install then ASUS drivers from DVD that came with MB then win updates. Nothing else. No fiddling with any windows settings, just open WMC and run setup for TV tuner. On occasions when I wanted to reset WMC I used Task Scheduler > Microsoft > Windows > Media Centre > MediaCentreRecoveryTask. I did this at the same time as uninstalling and removing BGT3620 card and drivers and deleting all files beginning with 11317231* in C:\Windows\. I added the registry settings recommend by Blackgold but this did not resolve the issue either.

I tried changing various BIOS settings to disable ASPM, setting PCIe to Gen1, using PCIex16 (connected directly to CPU) vs remaining slots connected via the H81 chipset. As a final trial I set every MB setting to be same as my H81M-C (which is working without problems). The two BIOS look very similar (same terminology for power settings etc). This still did not fix the issues.

I have swapped over the BGT3620 cards (they both work fine in the H81M-C) so I know it is a software fault rather than one-off HW failure. I am going to put the two BGT3620s in my H81M-C and cross my fingers that I don't stop this machine working. At least it will be a quad tuner system.

IMHO Do Not Buy a BGT3620 unless you have seen it working already in the system you are going to put it in. I notice SCAN have stopped selling these also. I have spent around 30hrs looking into this.

This is coupled with a message in the event viewer about a tuner error (critical error). Resorted to using a dual DVB-t2 TBS card from CCL. So far so good and no problems with that one. I have switched 'off' the link state power management under PCI express in Power Options.

PLEASE CAN YOU POST YOUR MOTHERBOARD DETAILS INC BIOS REV if you have a blackgold dual or quad tuner working in your system?

Thanks.

Re: BlackGold BGT3620 - Owner's Thread

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:13 pm
by DrBen